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Comment Not just "news" papers (Score 3, Informative) 31

It's not just the papers that print news.

A friend of mine owned and operated a paper that printed free classified ads. The classified ads were free and he made his money by selling business display ads in the paper and by selling the printed paper itself.

After 26 years of operation, he just printed his last issue and closed up shop a couple of weeks ago. He said that the whole classified ad thing has moved online and there's just not enough demand left for what he was selling.

Comment Re:A.I. Run Job Interviews (Score 2) 60

I was going to say Applicant Tracking Systems. The glorified grep scripts that preceded them were bad enough, but these new LLM-powered ATSes are far worse. They are shockingly even more inflexible than the keyword-matching scripts, and are loaded with biases such as a strong ballot order effect (they prefer the first candidate if given a list), not-invented-here syndrome (they prefer resumes written by the same LLM), status quo bias (they prefer candidates who are most similar to the preferred candidates they've been trained on so they dislike anyone with an unconventional work history), and of course the usual racial and gender biases LLMs always pick up from training data.

Someone at an AI company knew exactly how disastrous letting LLMs pick job applicants would be, and if that person didn't do everything in their power to stop it they are a moral failure. If they did nothing to stop it or even actively encouraged it, they participated in a crime against humanity.

See also:

https://www.businessinsider.co...

Comment Re:TL;DR (Score 1) 144

Reasonably priced and good quality MP3 players are surprisingly difficult to find now.

The best were Sandisk but that entire line has been discontinued.

Now you have a choice between $30 cheap junk that may or may not work for a week, and Sony players that are probably pretty good but the price will blow you away.

Comment Re:These people are ghouls (Score 1) 93

My favorite bit is that companies - who are on supposedly universally seething with unadulterated greed, mind you, are now somehow uninterested in the $millions per year they could save on commercial real estate letting people work from home, using their own kitchens and offices (for free) rather than the $140 persqft downtown office space?
And this is because, let me see, they somehow get off on flexing on the peons who (supposedly) are just as effective from home?

Maybe roll through that narrative in your head again, see if it makes sense this time:
- allegedly workers are really JUST AS EFFECTIVE from home (according to them)
- they could work entirely from home, easily saving businesses $millions/year
- and yet the pointy-heads don't want this just so ... they can wander around the office with a stale cup of coffee, ogle the secretary's tits, and force the peons to genuflect?

Of course. Makes perfect sense.

This conflict is real, but it doesn't make the problem fake. What you didn't account for is that unadulterated greed is not perfectly smart and rational greed: PHBs are real, and they don't take perfectly rational paths to what they see as maximizing profits. See how they try to replace workers with LLMs to disastrous results for one quick example from recent history. Likely the biggest irrational factor is that they've spent a lot of money on flashy corporate real estate that feeds their egos as a status symbol, with a fancy corner office inside that compounds the effect. Trading this in for a home office that looks no different from any working-class employee's dingy improvised office space once the fake video backgrounds are applied would be soul-crushing to them. The people who seek executive positions also seek prestige and the trappings of power, and most of them wouldn't trade that in for more extra money that does nothing to make them feel powerful or prestigious during working hours. Their judgment is also clouded by the conflict between personal and corporate profits, and most of these people are invested heavily in real estate that will depreciate if a bunch of companies stop owning buildings that they only use for 8-10 hours a day, to say nothing of any fossil fuel or automotive investments they may have.

So your last point was on the right track, if underselling what they're getting out of this. Parking their supercar in the corporate HQ's reserved executive parking spaces and strutting around the corner office with a cup of coffee made to their exact specifications by an overworked assistant and ogling the tits of the secretary they personally selected for looking the most bangable is indeed worth a lot to them, and few have the willpower to deny themselves these more tangible pleasures to become the obscure head honcho of a more profitable company's Slack channels.

Comment Re:Older dictionaries (Score 2) 42

I try to write in a 1940's manner. Admittedly it's an affected style, but it works well with that kind of story.

style

n. 25B6; noun
        differing styles of management: MANNER, way, technique, method, methodology, approach, system, mode, form, modus operandi; informal MO.
        a non-directive style of counselling: TYPE, kind, variety, sort, genre, school, brand, pattern, model.
        wearing clothes with style: FLAIR, stylishness, elegance, grace, gracefulness, poise, polish, suaveness, sophistication, urbanity, chic, dash, panache, elan; informal class, pizzazz.
        Laura travelled in style: COMFORT, luxury, elegance, opulence, lavishness.
        modern styles: FASHION, trend, vogue, mode.
25B6; verb
        sportswear styled by Karl: DESIGN, fashion, tailor.
        men who were styled Â'knightÂ': CALL, name, title, entitle, dub, designate, term, label, tag, nickname; formal denominate.

Comment Goldendict (Score 0) 42

I write hardboiled detective stories, usually involving fairy tale and mythical creatures.

http://goldendict.org/

I have 17 dictionaries and thesauruses aggregated into goldendict and that program is open pretty much 100% of the time that I'm writing. When I've almost got a word or description I want, viewing synonyms and definitions in goldendict can be truly inspiring.

So goldendict is open on my desktop pretty much 100% of the time when I'm writing, right beside my text editor. (Vim, if you're interested in that.)

Comment Nobody else would be allowed (Score 2) 146

If anyone else had their entire fleet of vehicles stalled out and blocking traffic for hours in the middle of the city they would be given hefty fines for obstructing traffic and told to take their cars elsewhere.

But not Waymo, who for some reason are exempt from the rules that everyone else is expected to follow.

Comment Makes sense (Score 1) 16

If AI makes a programmer appear more productive instead of slower, it's means they're slapping code together with great haste producing a ton of bugs, and they're going to need more engineers to fix those bugs, thus increasing headcount and showing how AI improves productivity and saves mon- HEY WAIT A MINUTE

Comment Re:And? (Score 2) 56

The US and NATO have not been trying to beat Russia for nearly four years now.

They give Ukraine just enough to keep going but never enough to actually win because they don't want to see what would happen if Russia actually was on the way to being beaten.

This is what having nuclear weapons does for you, and why dictators like Kim will never give them up. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of your state and/or dictatorship continuing to exist.

It's also why Ukraine was foolish to return their nuclear arsenal to Russia after the breakup of the USSR. Had they kept them, this entire situation would not exist.

Comment Re:iRobot couldn't afford to operate. (Score 0) 74

This, the WSJ is transparent about its bias at least, especially now that it's owned by Jeff Bezos. But between being a financially unstable company to start with, selling a stale product that had filled its niche, getting slapped with massive tariffs by Trump, the WSJ chose to blame the trustbuster who attacked the boss' company, which is letting political axe-grinding turn into bad journalism.

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